Helen Garner People Quotations

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief; it's a kind of raging against what's happening.

While I was writing 'The Spare Room,' I thought, 'I'm going to look really bad in this book - there's no redeeming this kind of awful, ugly emotion', and I thought, 'I'm not going to change it. I'll call the character 'Helen' and admit to those feelings.' I think this is a reason why people write.

Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude, she lacked the detachment to challenge them.